I went to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) for a couple of days on work. That short trip has given me ideas for three blogposts, this being the first of them, so that’s a good thing…
The first thing about Malaysia is that it’s quite easy to begin to talk like them, lah! See, even I can do it now, yeaaah? Secondly, even coming from India, the diversity in Malaysia is quite amazing. Also, since a decent portion of the Malaysian population are ethnic Indians or Sri Lankans, I didn’t get stared at quite as much. 🙂
My first impression of KL was based on KLIA, the international airport that I arrived at. It was gleaming, squeaky clean and very very easy to get around. I haven’t seen a lot of international airports, but from among the few that I’ve been to (O’Hare, CDG, Heathrow, JFK, Frankfurt, Detroit) this is definitely the best one.
The second was how every available surface on the taxis were given up to advertising! And mostly job websites. Funnily enough, the person travelling in the taxi with me worked for naukri.com, an Indian job site!
The traffic is KL was completely crazy but the people amazingly polite about it. I barely heard any honking or loud yelling!
Despite the crazy traffic, public transport in KL is awesome. There are plenty of regular buses and also a railway system that extends to the suburbs. Despite these systems being run by 4 different companies, they’re quite well integrated with a lot of points where you can cross over from one system to the other. Oh, did I also mention the KLIA Express train that takes you from KL Central to the KLIA (KL International Airport) in precisely 28 minutes? And that’s a distance of around 60km!
Speaking of KL Central, that station is fantastic, if a little crowded! A neat well designed hub for the four railway lines, the express to the airport and bus services. It’s located just outside what is actually Kuala Lumpur and a short distance from the Kuala Lumpur railway station (where all the trains from outside the city arrive.)
I’ll put up some pictures of my trip in the next post with more impressions of the city!